


Andraste's Mabari

by Lilith von Beilschmidt (LilithK)



Series: Lynnae Cousland [3]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Animal Death, Character Death, Cousland (Dragon Age) Backstory, Gen, Goodbyes, Mabari, Warden Cousland (Dragon Age)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-16
Updated: 2020-03-16
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:42:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23185693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilithK/pseuds/Lilith%20von%20Beilschmidt
Summary: Zimt, the Warden's Mabari is old and despite all the efforts, he seems to be dying. Lynnae Cousland knows it may be the end, so she decides to just be by his side and sing him the song that had always reminded her of the two of them.A story about both love and loss. Cause there are few things stronger than a bond between a human and their mabari, even when the end is near.The MC is Lynnae Cousland, my Warden-Commander and Hero of Ferelden.
Relationships: Female Cousland/Mabari (Dragon Age), Female Warden & Warden's Mabari (Dragon Age), Mabari & Warden (Dragon Age), Mabari/Female Warden (Dragon Age), Warden & Warden's Mabari (Dragon Age)
Series: Lynnae Cousland [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1529885
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	Andraste's Mabari

“Hey, little boy!”  
  
The dog lifted his head slightly and moved his rump, waving the tiny, tiny tail as fast as it could. His eyes, his pose, his slow and deep breathing, all of them exuded sadness until he heard that voice. The armoured woman sat beside him and the animal started to sniff around to pinpoint her exact location, his eyes too cloudy to even see anymore. She helped by putting her hand in front of his nose, and he immediately bumped into it. The first time, because he miscalculated the distance; the second, to ask for pets. She laughed and started to scratch behind his ears.  
  
“Yes, Zimt, baby, I know you love this! Don’t worry, I have plenty.”  
  
The mabari howled a bit, even if his voice was weak. Opening his mouth, he seemed to unroll his long and rosy tongue and panted deeply and loudly. It sounded so bad, she thought, looking at him with eyebrows furrowed with both worry and pain. Lips tightly pressed, she kept on stroking the big, hairy head of his one and true companion.  
  
“Commander?”  
  
She looked up, hand still over the mabari’s head. The elf was meek-looking and almost too scared to even face her eyes. He was either cleaning very thoroughly his hands with the cloth or simply nervously playing with it. Whatever the case was, Lynnae fully trusted in his medical knowledge and put him in charge of the check-up of her mabari hound.  
  
“Tell me what I need to know.”  
  
The elf’s expression turned heavyhearted and he simply shook his head. He opened his mouth, as if to say something, but ended up short of words. Lynnae felt the weight in his stomach, the knot in his throat, the itch in her eyes. She took a deep breath and widened her smile, bowing her head to show due respect.  
  
“Thank you so much for everything.”  
  
“No need to, m’ lady,” he immediately replied “I did my best. Now, if you may excuse me, I shall better leave you alone.”  
  
She nodded and looked back at the dog. Unaware of the conversation, yet not so much of what was about to happen, she believed. She scratched a bit harder, trying to get his attention back.  
  
“Hey, Zimt… Do you remember the day we met?”  
  
The mabari made a reverberating sound that she took as a yes. Still, she decided it was best for both if she revived that story once more.  
  
“It was my… the eighteenth birthday, yes, that was it. Father was so excited the whole day for his present, Mother had to shut him up or else he would have spoiled the surprise! It was the day I officially became an adult and a few days after your mother had pups, so they decided it was the moment to finally let me have my own mabari. Did you know I had _always_ dreamt of having one? I loved dogs _all_ my life, yet Mother never let me have one. The closest thing I had was taking care of the little dog Gilmore had. A good dog, but he wasn’t you, you know.”  
  
The mabari let out a huff which almost sounded like “of course he wasn’t! I’m the best!”. Lynnae giggled and patted him gently on his back.  
  
“Right you are! No one could ever compare to you, my boy! But you were too little to remember how it came to be that I chose _you_ out of all your siblings. Because, you see, when I got to the place, it was brimming with lil’ pups! I expected a couple, yet there were so many puppies wandering around my feet I was scared of stepping on one! You all looked like little barely hairy potatoes, ready to be roasted in the oven.” she joked, pulling his ear a little bit “All the pups were so adorable I couldn’t even know what to do to choose just one. I looked at all of them, trying to find something, a sign, anything. And when I was about to make my mind up… You bit my shoe. I clearly remember I was trying to step away and you were biting my shoe and growling menacingly. You were almost telling me you were the one I was looking for! So, I picked you up, and you tried to bite my fingers still and I knew you were going to be the fighter I would need by my side. And I was bawling my eyes out while I hugged you close, saying you were the one, that it had to be you. See? I was right. You were the one and only for me, Zimt.”  
  
She noticed that the dog started to pant more heavily so she let him lay down again and started to stroke his whole back in long movements. Zimt closed his eyes but kept his ears up, as expecting more talking impatiently. She smiled, took a deep breath and looked at the starry sky above.  
  
“You were really rebellious at first. Too haughty to obey, too nervous to stay still, too active not to bite everything on sight. Oh, talking about biting, I hope you remember with shame how you destroyed Mother’s favourite slippers or the day you ruined the Cousland banner cause you decided to urinate on it. Oh, and so many wooden practice swords you munched and left unusable! At some point Fergus had to store them at the highest shelf or else none would be left. You were a real destroyer. And what about the odysseys I had to go through to get you washed? The day you ran away and stormed the main hall during a banquet, half-wet, half-still-covered-in-mud!” she started to laugh and patted his side “I would want you to be mortified by remembering how badly you behaved, but you jumped on Arl Rendon’s lap when I was trying to get you. Oh, Maker, the look of utter disgust on his face was priceless!”  
  
She stopped in the middle of her laughter; her gaze lost in the stars. Suddenly she realized what she just said, and the weight of the name sunk in her chest. She threw her free hand to her, where her heart lied and gulped the bitterness in her mouth. The dog noticed the sudden change and moved his head, whining softly. She looked back at him with a sad smile.  
  
“Sorry, boy. One kind of expects to stop being sad after so many years, but the truth is that it still lingers… It lingers so deep…” she murmured, getting a little closer to leave a little kiss between his pointy ears “My, my, what would have been of me if you had left my side that day… Everyone I knew, everyone I cherished, the whole castle I lived all my life in, all of them gone… All but you. Duncan may have saved my life from the turmoil, but without you by my side, Zimt, I wouldn’t have saved _myself_. You kept all my pieces together and lifted my head up enough to continue the fight, you helped me carry the Cousland in me till the very end. That’s… That’s so laudable. And you fought every battle, faced every single Darkspawn, walked relentlessly by my side and asked for nothing in return but a piece of meat or two and some scratch behind your ears.”  
  
The dog lifted his sight to meet hers and she helped him to by moving his face a little bit with her fingers. She stroked his side with care and got a little closer until their foreheads met.  
  
“My most precious and loyal fighter. The one who never failed me, the one who never left me. My treasure.” She separated a little bit and tilted her head to the side. “My most trusted companion and Hero of the Fifth Blight.”  
  
Zimt replied with a deep and meaningful woof, full of love and something akin to pride. Pride of having been the one he was needed to be, pride on having never failed his most trusted human. This time she could not stop the tears from flooding and she immediately buried her face in the fur of the mabari.  
  
“I’m going to miss you. I’m going to miss you so much.” Her cracked voice seemed to crack even more when she noticed she was actually saying a goodbye “I never thought this day would come, I never thought of having to part ways from you… I just… I just…” she cried even harder and held him even closer, noticing he was whining too “Why do you have to go where I cannot follow?”  
  
The mabari started to shake and Lynnae thought she was probably hugging too close and it was hurting him. She let go and apologized over and over, but as soon as she separated enough, the dog started to fill her whole face with licks. She hiccupped as the whining started to mix with giggles and the dog bumped his head on hers before going back to the ground to lay again, too weak to even handle so much action.  
  
“I know… I told you no tears and I broke the promise, sorry boy.” She cleaned her face with the back of her hand and breathed deeply a couple of times to avoid doing it again. “It’s hard, you know. Letting go, in general, it’s so hard. You were the only thing left I had from my past. Once you leave, it’s over, isn’t it?” she sighed and closed her eyes. “At least you will see them… Father and Mother, waiting for you with arms wide open. You will play fetch with Oren again and Oriana would give you more of those treats she got from Antiva. Doesn’t that sound nice? A good retirement for a hero like you?”  
  
Zimt replied with a weak howl, the weakest he had ever sounded in all his life. Lynnae knew what that could only mean. She could feel how he was still bumping his nose against her leg, wanting her attention for just a little longer, so she helped him lay his big head upon her thigh and petted him softly and slowly.  
  
“Hey, what if I sing to you our favourite song? You always liked to howl when I sang it, so I think it was because you liked it too, am I right?”  
  
The wiggle in his tale, even if faint, was a clear yes.  
  
So she closed her eyes again, breathed in deep and dived into their memories together: the happiest moments together, the ones she would want to always linger in her memory, the ones that would always bring a smile to her face, the ones that made Zimt the incredible mabari hound he was.  
  
The parts of her life she treasured the most, the ones she was about to bury inside her locked-up heart.  
  
  
 _“And there's Andraste's mabari by the Holy Prophet's side.”  
  
_ She started singing, her hand over the cinnamon-coloured fur of Zimt’s head.  
  
 _  
“In the fight against Tevinter, that dog would never hide.”  
_  
Zimt breathed in as deep as he could and breathed out until there was no more air left.  
  
  
 _“They say the Maker sent him special, always loyal, without pride.”  
  
_ She moved her hand across the thick coat of fur of his body, stroking him with utter care.  
  
  
 _“So he could be the sworn companion of the Maker's Holy Bride”.  
_  
When she reached his ribs, she felt how he was not breathing anymore.  
  
  
  
She stood quiet and silent for a moment, eyes still closed, mouth agape.  
  
  
  
Then she broke into tears.

* * *

_To my Nero,_

_my treasured mabari_

**Author's Note:**

> Here's a bit about this story and why I wrote it. 
> 
> One day, I found a video of a famous Dragon Age cosplayer (Harry Grace) singing to their newborn puppies the song "Andraste's Mabari" and I thought to myself I wanted to sing it to my dog since I had previously referred to him as my mabari. But I never could cause, on the 16th of February, my dog Nero died all of a sudden. He was everything to me and my world shattered to pieces.
> 
> It took me a whole month to pluck up the courage to write this... But I did, in the end. My HoF, Lynnae, shares a lot with me and one of the things is her absolute love and adoration for dogs. In fact, half of the things she talks about here are things about me and Nero, that happened in real life and shaped my eternal love for him. And, even though is sad, making her go through the loss of her mabari helped me to cope with my own sadness. Because I know she would understand the emptiness inside after one so loved is lost forever. Also, I made her do two things I never could in real life: sing him the song and being there when he took his last breath. It was like saying my last goodbye.
> 
> So yes... I know this is a hard story, I know no one wants dogs to die but this is something I did to heal myself, to say goodbye and to tell you all that love is beautiful even when it hurts so much.
> 
> Anyway, writing in English is my Achilles' heel since it's not my mother tongue so sorry even if beta'd there is some mistakes or weird-looking sentences.
> 
> Take care and remember to always spend time with your loved ones cause the day they are not there anymore you would regret it.


End file.
